Rugby

Thoughts On Rugby

During the past couple of weeks I've watched rugby matches three times, which is unusual for me, a bigotted soccer nut. However, when the call came (from friend Steve) two weeks ago to support England against the French I couldn't resist going to the Bar du Pont with him ; I even phoned Neville and Robin to come and join in. Alas, our support was to no avail. England put up a miserable performance from the beginning so there was really no opportunity to wind up our French friends, who were very gracious about hammering us.

The following weekend it was Wales turn to take on the French and, since Dave Flat was visiting and wanted to see the match, we all went along to the Bar du Pont again. This time I took a leek with me and became a surrogate Welshman, brandishing it in front of all and sundry whenever the Welsh caused the French some discomfort, which was quite often. Still to no avail but that was more fun for me.

For the final match, France against New Zealand, the Bar du Pont was closed (annual holidays) but I half-watched it at home. The French played their socks off, which provided some interest, but that was about the extent of it. I'm not a rugby fan and don't know a lot about the game but can enjoy a match if the play is free flowing. Friends Steve, Neville and Daniel are all fans so no doubt I will watch more games in the future but probably reluctantly. I have a few hang-ups about rugby.

I played it at school but was hopeless at it and never had any confidence. I wasn't heavy or strong enough to be a forward and not really fast enough or tricky enough to be a wing back. With a ball at my feet I could sell dummies by the shopful but never managed that with a ball in my hands. With a ball at my feet I had confidence and felt in control ; if I was going to get clobbered, I'd get a free-kick or penalty out of it. I lacked that confidence at rugby and got clobbered for nothing. My problems with rugby were both physical and psychological.

When I arrived at Rutlish Grammar at the age of 10 I was already a soccer nut and a Chelsea supporter. So I wasn't going to take kindly to rugby anyway. Shortly after my arrival, on one afternoon of atrocious weather, we couldn't play and were « treated » instead to a lecture on the traditions of the school. In the Q/A session afterwards I asked the master lecturing us why the school, in the 1930s, had switched from a successful soccer team to an unsuccessful rugby one. He responded : « Let me put it like this ; if we played soccer, what kind of schools would we play against ? » Well the answer could have been « Eton, Harrow, etc » but then they would never have played against us. The school had switched to rugby to differentiate itself not only from secondary schools but county grammars. If the school wasn't exactly upper class it wasn't going to be associated with the lower classes (in its estimation). Years later, when I was in the sixth form, I let slip to a friendly teacher that I was playing soccer for Tooting YMCA. He responded : « I should keep that to yourself if I were you ; there are some here who won't care but some who certainly will. »

I have often told myself that it is silly to let these experiences affect my attitude to rugby but find I have an innate knee-jerk reaction against it, much in the way that I reacted adversely for years to a public school accent. Petty snobbery should never be a part of sport (or anything else, come to that) and I think (hope) that much has changed in that respect over the years. Certainly my friends who love rugby are not in any way snobbish. Maybe I'll manage to get over my hang-ups (but I'll still be a totally unreasonable soccer nut).

Boules And Birthday

Second Boules Tournament

The second boules tournament duly took place last Sunday. The weather decided to play ball (sic) and friend Steve commented that it was much more pleasant in the 20+ degrees of the afternoon than it had been on the previous very hot occasion. This time around there were only 24 participants, half the previous number, but that was to be expected. Once again everybody seemed to enjoy the occasion, so it was another success. But................one unforeseen embarrassment occurred. The two highest scorers were given a gift box of three bottles of wine and the highest scorer as it turned out was Driss: a Moroccan moslem who didn't drink. We'll have to think of an alternative next year, although Idris graciously refused to be offended. The other slight inconvenience I noticed was that Daniel was once again messing around with various bits of paper to note down the scores and points attributable. I'm not sure what is required to get them to use my template but I'll have to think of it before next year.

The tournament was preceded by a lunch for the organisers and members of the Amities Mollanaise committee, about fifteen of us in all. Anne-Marie of the Amities Mollanaise held the lunch at her house, which also happens to be the wholesale fruit depot which her husband runs. She decided to have the lunch in one of the sheds where lorries arrive to unload fruit. Not the most elegant of venues then but the food was great: steaming boules of mussels and chips followed by cheese and three desserts. (Bringing a dessert when you're invited for lunch is traditional, as I think I've mentioned before; I brought a bottle of red wine to have with the cheese.) The location reminded me of the wedding of my late French friend Claude, when the lunch (not the wedding "breakfast", which was in the evening) was in the unloading bay of his wife's parents' shop. Typically French: bugger the decor, focus on the food. I must admit it tallies well with my own priorities. I remember a number of English restaurants where one was obviously paying for the decor rather than the food, much to my disappointment.

Birthday Celebration

I decided to put some bottles of fizz (Clairette de Die) behind the bar at the pizza evening this week to celebrate my birthday on Friday. It turns out I should have done it on the following Monday. As I was enlightened, the French never celebrate birthdays before the event, only at the event or afterwards. I suppose this is logical but it also carries a slightly disturbing (French realism?) connotation at my age: if your birthday hasn't already happened, how do you know you are going to get that far? Anyway, that didn't stop the Clairette getting drunk. Friend Jo very kindly brought some nibbles to eat with the wine as an aperitif and made a birthday cake and also a plate of crispy chocolate flan. The latter got rave reviews from the French who wanted to know if it was an English speciality. Of course I claimed it was; we don't get that many plaudits for our cuisine from the French that I was going to pass up the chance of one. And Roberto refused to accept payment for my pizza (actually a plate of lasagna, which he had as an alternative that evening) and that touched me.

The final advance celebration was that I decided I would treat myself to a very expensive set of professional boules as a birthday present. They are lighter than the ones I normally use (690 as against 730 grams) and made of a softer material. I need something like them if I am ever going to learn to shoot better. The lighter weight makes shooting easier and the softer material reduces the rebound when another boule is hit, increasing the probability that you'll stay somewhere around the cosh. I bought them today and decided to see how I could play with them this afternoon. As it turned out I slaughtered everybody playing so they are worth the money and I am happy with them.

A Good Autumn Evening

The Bar Du Pont
It was pizza evening this evening and we had it sitting outside on the Bar du Pont's terrace.  We've been doing that since May but it's the first time I can remember doing it outside in October; usually, the evenings become too cool after about 9.00 from mid-Septmber onwards.  So we are having the same Indian summer as Engand, with temperatures into the high twenties during the day and the heat continuing into the evening.

There was quite a lot to discuss with the regulars.  Friends Jo and Steve want to try again this year to get some Christmas carols sung out in the street and the one French friend we could find who was enthusiastic and was willing to sing was Rene.  So we decided to task Rene with finding another 7-8 French people who would be willing to sing.  "No problem", he said; and I watched with interest as he encountered the same problem as we had last year.  Christmas carols?  Great idea!  Sing? Oh no, we won't sing.  Going round everyone, Rene eventually came up with 5-6 possibles.  I think, though, we might just make it this year.  The plan is to sing 5-6 carols in English and the same number in French (with maybe one in Provencal), both outside the Bar du Pont and in the local old people's home.

Next item was the England-France rugby match on Saturday.  Rene got Patrique, who runs the Bar du Pont, to agree to have it on the large screen TV on Saturday morning and Steve and I agreed to go and watch the match with him.  Rene immediately started recruiting others to come and watch it together, so Steve and I are going to have to find some more English people to provide the opposition.  I'll start the phone around tomorrow.

Also on the discussion list was the "loi NOME", France's answer to the EU prescription for greater (or even some) competition in th electricity market.  The new law requires that the current EDF monopoly sell 25% of its output to alternative distributors.  I've commented previously that this is simply a nonsense.  However, the   new distribution possibilities require a new meter for which EDF proposed to charge all households 350 euros.  The howls of protest that greeted that proposal were followed by broadcast emails from someone who had discovered that EDF, under French law, had to get you to sign to accept the new meters and that if you didn't sign they couldn't charge you for them.  So EDF has now "graciously" declared that the new meters will be free.  Will they heck; their cost will find its way onto the electricity bills somehow and all for a nonsensical nod at competition.

Finally, it turned out to be the birthday of Valerie, Patrique's wife, although no one had realised (remembered) that it was.  Valeriere celebrated by standing us all coffee and a superb Marc from Chateau Neuf du Pape on the house.  It's touches like that that make me really love the village.

Clematis
Earlier during the day I investigated the hole I had dug a couple of years ago against the tree opposite my kitchen window.  The rose I planted had eventually given up the ghost and I was at first thinking of replacing it.  However, a local supermarket had some cheap clematis plants and I decided that a clematis might stand more chance of surviving in the stony ground.  So I bought one, renewed the hole and planted it; it's a Montana, so fairly hardy.  I'll have to wait until next year to see how it does.

Windows 7
I always hated having to change operating system and Windows 7, on my new laptop, is proving no exception.  The supposedly easy file transfer from XP using Windows Easy File Transfer is a pain and, inevitably, refuses to transfer some non-MS files.  More frustratingly, the presentation of a number of applications has changed, forcing me to change my normal way of working and, in some cases, rendering what I want to do almost impossible.  I have been in the habit of writing postings to this blog in Open Office and cutting and pasting them to the blog.  Now there seems to be no way to paste them.  Moreover, the facilities I had in Open Office to insert French accents aren't available in Blogger.  Rene (above) should have an acute accent on the last "e" and there is no way I can find to insert that.  Maybe, over time, I will discover ways or maybe I'll just have to put up with the lack of facility.  Anyway, for the moment I hate Windows 7.

The Last Three Weeks

Social
Robin and Jill invited me for aperitifs and were clearly relying on me for any interpretation nececssary as all the other invitees were French neighbours from along the road. Afterwards Robin thanked me for coming and said that they wouldn't have had the courage to do it without me. That was nice of them but really reflected a lack of confidence on their part rather than their level of French. I am sure they would have managed quite well without me; I was called on to translate only 3-4 times and then for nothing very important.

I was pleased to have been invited because the evening went extremely well and we decided to have a repeat get-together. As we searched for a date I suggested the 5th of November, the only date in the required period that had any significance for me. That turned out to be somebody's birthday so we decided on that; I've no idea what we will do. The evening introduced me to two new residents who could become friends. The brother of my neighbour Florence and his wife have moved into the village from Tahiti and bought a house just down from the Bar du Pont which they are having completely renovated. The wife, Sylvie, is an A S Neill fan so we had plenty to talk about. They apparently decided that the regime inTahiti was becoming unstable and, as their daughters were approaching university age and also because of the proximity of Florence and Jean-Marc, they have moved here and their daughters are studying in Lyon.

The second village boules day has been decided for the 9th of October so I have lost my battle to have it scrapped for this year. However, I got the others to accept that if there are to be two such days next year they should both be scheduled for the June-August time-frame. I got the others to agree that the deadline for signng up should be on the poster announcing the event and Daniel convinced me that we could draw up beforehand a schedule of "fixtures" for all numbers of registrants; ten will be needed for 20-56 players.

My Mother
I decided on another trip back to England to see my mother and will go yet again before Christmas. She had been giving up on life, depressed and not eating or drinking nearly enough. She is barely mobile at all now and complains that all days are the same. Unfortunately that cannot be denied and I'm at a loss to know what to do about it; I shall try audio books next time over, a suggestion from friend Jo. My mother no longer has the stamina to read or watch TV programmes of any length. The situation is not helped by our having little to say to one another; I do few new things and she, of course, none at all. I make sure she has flowers in her sitting room, blooms in the pots on the patio outside it and food for the birds who visit her bird table but that is about the sum of it. Often I feel guilty about not staying with her longer but can't stand the thought of sitting beside her waiting for her to die, which is effectively what it would be. More frequent trips, which serve to keep her morale up at least, will have to be the solution for now.

I sometimes wonder how we will deal with similar situations in the future, when more of us will live for longer. The extended family of the past, all living in close proximity, was a solution before its time and is not likely to recur. Television is a help but friend Jo has a mother even older and more handicapped than mine, blind and deaf. It's easy to question the point of being able to extend the length of life if quality of life can't be similarly extended but far from easy to think of a solution. I wonder how I will deal with that situation if ever I get to it.

Feminism
I've remarked before that I think the French have a more sensible approach to feminism than their anglo-saxon counterparts, avoiding some of the excesses of the latter (as far as a mere man can be allowed to judge). However, there is now a battle going on here in the matter of titles (Mr, Ms, Mrs). There is no French equivalent to Ms and nobody has been able to invent an acceptable one. So the French feminist intelligentsia(?) has decreed that all females should have the title "madame" and is trying to get this enforced in law. For myself, and most French friends, the idea of addressing a 5-year old girl as madame seems ludicrous but, hey, we may become accustomed to it; who knows? I doubt though whether the issue will occupy much of anyone's attention.

On a similar note I found myself saying a quiet "hurrah" to David Cameron's speech to the UN reported on TV when I was in England, when he said that it was pointless the UN voting any more human rights if it was not prepared to do anything about implementing them. I'm not well know for hurrahs for David Cameron but think he made a very interesting point. Fine notions at the UN are two a penny; significantly changing the way the world works for the better is another matter.

Change

New Season
Boules has been rained off today so I thought it was about time I updated my blog, although nothing of a great deal of interest has happened in the past two weeks. One thing is that the season has changed. It occurs to me that the seasons are barely discernible in England apart, perhaps, from the lack of frosts during the summer. April was apparently brilliant but the weather there since has been indifferent. Here, the mini heat-wave that started as I left for England continued until the last few days of August when a violent storm brought in a change to autumnal weather, which I actually prefer. Temperatures are down to the mid- twenties and the evenings will become increasingly cool. The important constant is the sun. Weather forecasts here are notoriously unreliable, as in England, but here because we are in a border zone between the alpine climate just to the north and the Mediterranean climate just to the south. However, over any sequence of days the weather will conform to that dictated by the season.

It's also a new football season, so one of the real passions of my life can be given its head again.

My summer display of flowers is now over, the remnants looking rather wretched. Neighbors say that what they really appreciate is that there are flowers in front of my house all the year round but that is not quite true. I shan't attempt anything more until November and I'm beginning to think I should hold off doing the summer planting until some time in June. Because spring came early this year, I planted in early May and have had problems keeping the display going even this long. The big success was the jasmine, which flowered continuously for three months. I need changes at the back too; annuals simply don't work there. The ground is so bad that plants take considerable time to establish themselves, which dictates perennials only.

And I've discovered a new ingredient for meals. I always knew that nasturtium leaves were edible but have never really tried them. Now I have and they turn out to be the nearest thing to rocket apart from rocket itself. I shall use the in future instead of buying rocket.

In Memoriam
A good friend and former colleague, Ken Kolence, died at the end of last month. I met Ken at the NATO conference on software engineering in 1968 and subsequently turned down a job offer from him at the Institute fro Software Engineering in Palo Alto on my return from wandering out east. So he came looking for me in London a year later and persuaded me to start a European operation for him. He was brilliant in many ways, the first person to recognise the need for, and produce, tools for computer performance monitoring. He was also what the Americans would call an 'ornery bastard, which probably resulted in his having a less successful career than might have been. IBM (allegedly) tried to take out his relatively modest software operation because it was costing them sales (spurious ones) and, in his own words, he . But he was a good and generous friend to me and the IT industry owes him more than it will probably ever appreciate.

A Depressing Experience

A Depressing Experience
I'm just back from a week in England and have to admit that, apart from the pleasure of seeing my mother and kids, it was a depressing experience. The weather was part of it. I had hoped to get my mother to sit in her garden or to take her out to see a public garden in the vicinity but the weather was simply not suitable; as a final resort, I brought some friends of hers over to see her. I thought that if the weather was like this in mid-August (constant overcast skies, if not too much rain), had I still been living in England, what would I be looking forward to in November through to April? Maybe I'm just becoming a weather freak. The psychological effect, anyway, is considerable.

Then there were the riots. I arrived as they were fizzling out and thus got a week's worth of the aftermath in TV and newspaper coverage. Being somewhat locked up with my mother, I watched a lot of television: Newsnight, Question Time, Horizon, you name it. And the quality of debate I found appalling, even allowing for the inevitable inane point-scoring by the politicians involved. (Why, I ask myself, must we regard this as inevitable? But it seems to be.) Numerous very pertinent points were made almost incidentally in these programmes but none really homed in on and nailed down by the programme presenters.

There was the colleague of the New York cop invited to advise the government on zero-tolerance strategies who stated that crucial to the success of this exercise in New York had been recruitment of an extra 5000 policemen. But the UK government is proposing the exact opposite. Why wasn't this point nailed down and explored? Instead, we had a focus on sterner sentences, most of which will inevitably be reduced on appeal.

The morality aspect was explored with the help of a couple of bishops and, similarly inevitably led nowhere. Morality is much too personal to help in this case, although it did provoke a mention of the role of the banks in creating the economic situation which contributed to the riots.

Another point I thought very pertinent was that of the social infrastructure around many of the kids and areas involved; there is none, apart from the local gangs. So how does that get changed? Nobody, it seemed, really wanted to discuss this; the agenda was sterner policing.

And what about the role of schools? At a time when half of teachers supposedly want out of the profession, wasn't this relevant? Even when the most common reason they want out is a lack of discipline and the means to impose it in schools? Not explored; the focus had to be on sterner policing.

Another interesting point was the role that modern telecommunications played in the organisation of the riots. So what's the most simplistic solution? Shut them down, was the cry. Fortunately a policeman pointed out that these social networking tools were equally important to the police.

There seemed to be almost a conscious collusion between the programmes and politicians that any avenue for a possible way forward that entailed extra resources being provided (even police) was to be mentioned only in passing and then set aside.

There is no denying the government's predicament in providing extra resources, given the economic situation, but this problem is simply not going to go away without them. So, time for some creative thinking, outside the box? Dream on.

I hoped that possibilities such as the use of a volunteer workforce or possible extra pennies for job seekers with suitable skills might be explored. Again, dream on. What we got was tired, old and failed remedies from politicians concerned more with point-scoring and programme presenters with blunt teeth. The overwhelming impression was that the powers that be really did not want to get to grips with this problem, had no idea how to tackle it or simply preferred fatuous populist slogans. And, oh boy, was that depressing. I came away with the impression that England was bankrupt not just in terms of money but also ideas. Brain death is now the criterion for the truly dead.

Dark Thoughts

Dark Thoughts
It's been a lovely day today but one that, to me, has turned out to have curious echoes of the circumstances surrounding the song that almost says the same thing: it's a lovely day tomorrow.

There was a heavy storm over Saturday night and rain fell for most of Sunday; so no watering to be done today. I spent the morning pottering and on the computer, did some shopping, played boules and went to the Bar du Pont for the usual pizza this evening. Friends Steve and Jo have their daughter and family staying with them and I asked how they had spent the day. Similarly peacefully and happily it seemed, grandchildren playing in their pool, adults reading books, etc.

All this contrasted bleakly with the news emanating from England, to where I shall return for a week on Thursday. The episodic, dispersed and mindless violence that appears to be going on there seems to have little rhyme or reason behind it and that is worrying. Riots for a reason are understandable, however outlandish or mistaken the reason might be. Riots for apparently no reason bespeak an underlying malaise, in the society; in Shakespeare's words, something rotten. That is not so surprising in view of the economic conditions, particularly for young people, in the country and the same applies, indeed, for most of Europe; but is worrying nonetheless.

Then, at the end of the pizza evening, I was left talking to Alex, a part-time resident of the village who has spent most of his life working in finance in London. He's never exactly a barrel load of laughs but our discussion on the general economic outlook was even more depressing than usual, against a backdrop of stock markets falling all over the western world. I had to agree with him that it is difficult to see how Greece can stay in the euro zone but equally difficult to see how it can opt out of it. So Europe is in the frying pan alongside the UK.

What worries me most in all this is that all these portents point to a repetition of the political conditions that prevailed in the nineteen thirties and led to a huge swing to the political far right and a swathe of fascist movements. True, the riots in England can doubtless be contained and may prove transient. True also, the US and Europe may print large quantities of money or find some other way of achieving a temporary equilibrium. But, and it is a big but, the underlying widespread economic weakness will certainly not go away easily and the thus neither will the potential for fascist movements.

Racial tension is an ever-present potential tinderbox in most of Europe. If, as seems likely later in the year, Germany is called on again to bail out Greece (France is not in a position to do any more without joining the list of failing European economies) what will the political reaction be there? And what will the popular political reaction be to the austerity measures that will almost inevitably affect the rest of Europe over the next few years? It hardly needs saying that riots, whether in the UK or elsewhere, usually lead to general demands for sterner policing and government. The only way out of this that we could find in the nineteen thirties was to have a world war.

Of course, we are nowhere near that now. And the EU has been created in the meantime with a specific goal of avoiding wars in Europe (but not fascist or neo-fascist governments; Hitler's goal, after all, was to unite Europe). Maybe I am just having a bad evening. But it has made me wonder whether my little corner of paradise in Mollans is something of a fool's paradise. It is certainly sheltered from much that is going on in the rest of the world.